Word crushes

Love

Torsten Blackwood/Getty Images

Valentine's Day is a time to celebrate things we love -- like balloons, or words, or words about balloons. (Above: Heart-shaped balloons are tied to the summit of the Sydney Tower to mark Valentine's Day in Sydney, Australia.)

Valentine's Day is a time to celebrate things we love -- like balloons, or words, or words about balloons. (Above: Heart-shaped balloons are tied to the summit of the Sydney Tower to mark Valentine's Day in Sydney, Australia.) (Torsten Blackwood/Getty Images)

Heidi Stevens, Tribune Newspapers

Sometime around the spring of junior year — in the midst of ACT prepping and driver's license procuring and prom planning — I fell in love. Hard.

Not with my prom date, fortunately. (He wore a top hat. And, later, makeup.) No, the object of my teenage affection was the word "ethereal," which I introduced exhaustively and inappropriately in countless conversations with friends and family and co-workers at my mall job.

As crushes go, it was fairly short-lived and lacked the collateral damage that later affairs of the heart would impose. But I've never forgotten it. My partners in mall retail probably haven't either.

I take comfort, though, in knowing I'm not alone. Word crushes are downright commonplace. (Right?) We asked a few of our favorite language experts to reveal theirs.

"The word was 'abalone, and the book was 'Island of the Blue Dolphins' by Scott O'Dell. I was about 9 years old when I read the book, growing up 1,500 miles away from the nearest ocean, and I mispronounced the word as 'ab-uh-LONE,' but I thought it was such a beautiful, haunting word. I was pretty sad when I figured out that word was really pronounced 'ab-uh-LOW-nee.' So much of its beauty depended on that mispronunciation.

—Kory Stamper, associate editor at Merriam Webster

"I fell in love twice in the first grade: First with my teacher, Miss Prosser, and then with 'triceratops,' a word as large and strange as the flange-headed beast it denoted. Thanks to triceratops (and Miss Prosser), I learned that 'tri' means three, a very useful thing to know. I learned also that polysyllabic words impress and annoy grown ups in equally gratifying ways. To this day I teach rhetorical terms like 'anadiplosis' and 'metonymy' to delighted youngsters while adults shrink in fear. Soon after Miss Prosser taught me that splendorous saurian terminology, I caught her kissing a man (her fiance, it turned out) during recess. But triceratops has never betrayed me."

—Jay Heinrichs, author of "Word Hero: A Fiendishly Clever Guide to Crafting the Lines That Get Laughs, Go Viral and Live Forever" (Three Rivers Press)

"Something about 'kerfuffle' struck me as wonderful and I fell in love with the word. It calls to mind tussling chickens and flying feathers and seems just right for describing a crazy fuss that we'll all soon forget.

"Probably pupíček , the Czech word for belly-button. (Navel is pupek; pupíček is the diminutive of navel, which would correspond English belly-button.) I know I had an imaginary friend named that. I would have been 2 or 3. As for English, I don't really know, but we got to choose our own spelling words in first grade, and I remember my first test included chimney and hippopotamus."

—Steve Kleinedler, executive editor, American Heritage Dictionary

"I remember falling in love with — of all things — pea-green. Lucky for me, this was the early '70s, when that color was more prevalent.

"I remember becoming obsessed with 'defenestrate.' Years ago when I was an assistant, one of my co-workers mentioned this word, and as you can imagine, there were many times I wanted to defenestrate myself after a hard day of work. It was just such a technical-sounding word for the meaning that it held. I definitely managed to insert it into several conversations that I'm sure didn't need it."

"As best as I can recall it was 'macabre,' whose sound and meaning suited my adolescence. How cool to draw out that second syllable and snap it off with a French ending — macaaahhh-bruh. And to a young would-be iconoclast, what wasn't 'gruesome, ghastly, and horrifying' — in a good sense? 'Hey, you read "Lolita"? Macaaahhh-bruh, man!' Today, as applied to presidential campaigns and such, I still love the word."